Surviving MOF

I woke up feeling reborn. The world seemed bright and shiny, but I realized something was up when I saw the tv diagonally up on the wall and I was wearing the wonderful hospital gown. I remember dr L sitting next to the bed and smiling at me. She kept asking me how I Felt and I just kept repeating reborn. My face felt like it was going to split from the wide grin on my face. My husband was to my left and while the pain was there, it seemed muted somehow. The phlebotomy team would come early in the morning and I remember the one who seemed to take that little bit of extra time to share a small portion of the real them. I remember thinking how wonderful their energy was towards me. They might not know how much that means when shits just hit the fan and you don’t quite have your bearings yet. I had spent the past few years thinking my life was over. The pain had consumed every aspect of my life. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t watch a tv show or movie. I couldn’t leave the house . I was scared. I was confused. I had been taught that doctors are the ones you trust. They get paid the money that allows them to pretend to care, listen and small chat about their yearly vacation to Alaska. You have to fly a private plane. To get to where this guy would go. The pills were so many. The patches took precident too. There has to be another way I thought.

The discovery channel had the Alaska wilderness tv show on, or maybe it was the gold searching one. It was my touchstone. I needed to come back. He had died on me. He was falling apart. I wanted to come back for myself. I couldn’t take my pills that morning. He had to call 911. I don’t know if I fought the EMTs or not, but I must have because I had large purple bruises all over my arms and an ugly blister that the hubby thinks was from a strap of some sort. I also had to learn how to sleep with a full face mask while sleeping in a hospital. If you’ve never slept in the hospital, count your lucky stars. The good ole Doctor g, I guess, didn’t know, or ask the right questions, or I didn’t tell him, or maybe we didn’t know what to look for, but I was experiencing what is called sleep apnea. Many people have it. I wasn’t aware of it. You stop breathing while sleeping. I had noticed that I wasn’t dreaming and I missed it terribly. I remember asking the hubby if something was wrong because I wasn’t dreaming. I also had the clock. The clock test, it kind of saved my life too. It stuck in my head that if you couldn’t draw a clock, that something’s wrong with you. I repeatedly would draw that damn thing. Small notepads had my attempts on many pages. I would later, after getting out, ask the hubby if he still had those notebooks. I remember asking and him saying no, I threw them out. That’s probably for the best, as moving on has been one of the best drugs there are.